Soleimani contributed to an attack in Delhi says Trump: Is he referring to the one in 2012

New Delhi, Jan 04: Defending the killing of top Iranian commander in a US strike, President Donald Trump said the "reign of terror is over" and claimed Qasem Soleimani had contributed to "terrorist plots as far away as New Delhi and London."

Trump has not gone into the specifics regarding the Delhi attack. However, back in 2012 there was an attack in Delhi and the police had blamed a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards for the same.

In 2012, there was an attack on Israeli diplomats in New Delhi. One of the embassy staff members was injured in the attack. A similar incident was reported at Georgia, but the bomb was defused.

In Delhi, a motorcyclist attached a sticky bomb to the car in which the wife of a Israeli diplomat was travelling. The lady Tal Yehoshua Koren sustained moderate injuries. The driver and two bystanders too suffered minor injuries.

The police arrested an Indian journalist Mohammad Ahmad Kazmi who claimed to work for an Iranian news organisation. The Delhi police had said that the terrorists belonging to a branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards were responsible for the attack. Kazmi is currently out on bail.

General Soleimani, the head of Iran's elite al-Quds force and architect of its regional security apparatus, was killed following a US airstrike at Baghdad's international airport on Friday. The strike also killed the deputy chief of Iraq's powerful Hashed al-Shaabi paramilitary force.

"Soleimani made the death of innocent people his sick passion, contributing to terrorist plots as far away as New Delhi and London. Today we remember and honour the victims of Soleimani's many atrocities and we take comfort in knowing that his reign of terror is over," Trump said.

"The recent attacks on US targets in Iraq, including rocket strikes that killed an American and injured four American servicemen very badly, as well as a violent assault on our embassy in Baghdad, were carried out at the direction of Soleimani," Trump told reporters at Mar-a-Lago in Florida.

Trump alleged that Soleimani has been perpetrating acts of terror to destabilise the Middle East for the last 20 years.

"What the United States did yesterday should have been done long ago. A lot of lives would have been saved. Just recently Soleimani led the brutal repression of protesters in Iran, where more than 1,000 innocent civilians were tortured and killed by their own government," he said.